Saturday, November 01, 2014

Journalist: Working for the CIA & NATO

Members of the German media are paid by the CIA in return for
spinning the news in a way that supports US interests, and some German
outlets are nothing more than PR appendages of NATO, according to a new book by Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany's largest newspapers.

Ulfkotte is a serious mainstream journalist. Here he is on Germany's leading political talk show
a couple of years ago. The book is a sensation in Germany, #7 on the
bestseller list. Its political dynamite, coming on the heels of German
outrage of NSA tapping of their phones. Check out the RT.com story on
it in the video below.

Here at Russia Insider,
it has long been apparent to us that there is something distinctly odd
about the German media regarding Russia. We follow it, and it is much
more strident than even the anglo-saxon media regarding Russia, while
German public opinion is much more positive towards Russia than in other
countries.

Another interesting thing about it is that it is
very disparate. Some major voices are very reasonable about Russia, but
most are negative, and some are comically apocalyptic. This is what
one would expect if there was some financial influence ginning the
system.

We've been talking about this for a while now. German
public opinion is becoming more and more fed up with the what they
increasingly believe to be a rigged media, and its starting to come out
everywhere.

The allegations, while shocking, are consistent with the CIA's long and well-established history of media infiltration.

Operation Mockingbird, which began in the 1950s, was a secret CIA operation
which recruited journalists to serve as mouthpieces for the American
government. The program was officially terminated after it was exposed
by the famous Church Committee investigations, but evidence of ongoing CIA influence over the media continues to accumulate.

Just last week Glenn Greenwald's (of Edward Snowden fame) new groundbreaking investigative website, The Intercept,
charged that the CIA leveraged its considerable influence - some might
even say friendship - with media in order to discredit Gary Webb, the
fearless American journalist who uncovered CIA cocaine trafficking as
part of the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.

On September 18, the agency released a trove of
documents spanning three decades of secret government operations.
Culled from the agency’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, the
materials include a previously unreleased six-page article titled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story.”
Looking back on the weeks immediately following the publication of
“Dark Alliance,” the document offers a unique window into the CIA’s
internal reaction to what it called “a genuine public relations crisis”
while revealing just how little the agency ultimately had to do to
swiftly extinguish the public outcry.

Thanks in part to
what author Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer
at the time of publication, describes as “a ground base of already
productive relations with journalists,” the CIA’s Public Affairs
officers watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country
rescued the agency from disaster, and, in the process, destroyed the
reputation of an aggressive, award-winning reporter.